Environmental Bond Act Is Little Used

By JOHN RATHER

Published: January 18, 1998

A $200 MILLION state program to clean up and reuse idle or abandoned commercial and industrial sites has been virtually ignored on Long Island, where less than $60,000 has been distributed.

The program, financed by a $1.75 billion environmental bond act that state voters approved in 1996, was intended as a major initiative to recycle so-called brownfields, properties with actual or probable contamination from dumping, leaks or other legal and illegal activities.

In interviews last week local officials and experts on the program said its restrictions outweighed its benefits, which include state financing and liability protection.

The program, a cornerstone of the bond act, pays 75 percent of the costs of investigations and cleanups for eligible site on land owned by cities, counties, towns, villages, schools, public authorities, state-recognized Indian nations or tribes and some local agencies, provided that those owners were not the polluters.

More significantly the program offers municipal owners and subsequent owners protection from a web of complex liabilities. The liabilities, in which current as well as previous owners take financial responsibility for cleanups, create brownfields even in cases where contamination is limited and easily cleaned up, according to the state. In such cases, supporters of liability limits said, even a suspicion of contamination could repel prospective buyers and lenders.

After having been cleaned up, properties can be used as parks or other municipal purposes or sold to developers. The sales would partly or completely pay for cleanups. The state and municipality would divide any remaining profit.

The program does not apply to heavily contaminated properties that are on state or Federal Superfund lists.

Experts on the program said it was in part intended to invite cooperation between developers and municipalities, with municipalities being able to buy blights and eyesores, clean them up with a state grant and sell the property to developers, who would be protected from liability from the former contamination.

Since the program began one grant has gone to Long Island, $57,000 to the Town of Huntington, to investigate contamination in a nature study area that had been closed because of trash burning.

The bond act, which included $200 million to clean up of Long Island Sound and additional tens of millions for other environmental projects, was proposed by Gov. George E. Pataki and approved in a statewide referendum in November 1996. The referendum was approved by wide margins in Nassau and Suffolk Counties.

An official of the State Environmental Conservation Department, which issues the grants, said last week that the low number of Long Island applicants was not necessarily a sign of low interest.

''It's kind of a new program,'' the regional director, Ray E. Cowen, said. ''We've done a lot of outreach. But we will do more.''

Mr. Cowen said five other applications from Long Island had been found eligible, with one approved for an environmental investigation.

One applicant, the City of Glen Cove, found the program of limited value, Mayor Thomas R. Suozzi said, adding: ''It's a good effort. But it doesn't go far enough. Why should we be limited to municipally owned property? Why shouldn't we be allowed to go into privately held property? And so what if the city did contribute to the pollution in the past. Why put all these restrictions on it?''

Mr. Suozzi said that Glen Cove had applied under to investigate three waterfront parcels but that the applications represented only a tiny part of Federal and state programs that were enabling the city to carry out a $280 million five-year waterfront revitalization.

That effort includes a $20 million Federal Superfund cleanup and efforts to clean and reuse other waterfront brownfields.

Glen Cove is one of 40 finalists in a Federal competition to choose 10 Brownfields Showcase Communities. The others include Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston and Baltimore.

In Suffolk, the assistant county executive for environmental affairs, George Proios, also said the state program had limited uses. ''We looked at our properties and couldn't come up with anything,'' Mr. Proios said. ''The requirements are so ridiculous there are not going to be very many applications. They just don't leave very much.''

Others said that while the program was off to a slow start in Nassau and Suffolk it offered promise.

In an article to appear in New York Environmental Lawyer, a publication of the state bar association, Douglas R. Hirsch, a lawyer in Garden City who specializes in environmental law, said Long Island had up to 2,000 brownfields that ''could be redeveloped and put to productive use.''

In an interview, Mr. Hirsch said the program provided incentives for municipalities, sometimes working in concert with developers, to buy properties, clean them up and sell them to developers, who would be protected from environmental liabilities.

''The program is intended for the entire state, but for whatever reason the upstate municipalities are the ones that have taken advantage of it,'' said Mr. Hirsch. Buffalo, he said, was given $225,000 to investigate three sites.